Accessibility

Every editor, panel, pane, dialog and tool card works from the keyboard and with a screen reader.

• Dialogs are modal: they are announced with their title, the first field takes the focus, Tab and Shift+Tab cycle inside the dialog, Esc closes it and the focus goes back to where it was.
• Lists, trees, tab strips and option groups (layer and net lists, the Checks tree, segmented choices such as the routing mode) are one Tab stop each: the arrow keys, Home and End move inside them, Enter or Space activates the item. In a tab strip or an option group the choice follows the focus.
• Status and results are read out as they change: the tool status line, check summaries, export and update progress are polite live regions; errors in a dialog are announced at once.
• Icon buttons and fields always have a name: the button’s tooltip, or the label shown next to the field.
• Reduced motion. When the operating system asks for less motion, spinners, flashes and panel transitions stop and tool clips show their still poster instead of playing.
• High contrast. Every colour of the interface is a VS Code theme colour or a Electronics Designer token, so the VS Code high-contrast themes (dark and light) restyle the whole Electronics Designer: contrast borders on dialogs and floating bars, the theme’s focus colour on the focused control. With the VS Code canvas theme (softforge.edsnx.theme = vscode, Electronics Designer: Select Colour Theme…) the board and schematic canvases switch to high-contrast palettes: fully saturated layer colours, opaque ratsnest and the theme’s accent colour for the selection, on the editor background.

The accessibility checks run with the tests: axe-core over both editors, every panel, the tool gallery, a tool card and every dialog, with no serious or critical finding allowed, and pixel snapshots of the editors under the high-contrast themes.